 Steve, last December you published an op-ed titled a five point plan to save Harvard from itself in the Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. And that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized, but you also noted that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't wanna hear hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard? And we'll go from Harvard to a larger academic setting, but how are things going there? It seems as if free speech was embraced by the former president of Harvard and by many people in the institution, but is it a real commitment to free speech and intellectual seriousness? Yeah, well, Harvard's a big place and there is a diversity of opinion in co-founding the council on academic freedom at Harvard. There was a rush of faculty joining us, but still a small percentage of the faculty. Many of them vocal, many of them for the first time had an opportunity to just communicate with themselves across the sprawling multiple campuses at Harvard. Many are upset at the direction that Harvard and other elite universities have taken in restricting the range of expressible opinions to a pretty narrow slice of the spectrum, to criminalizing certain opinions, to getting into needless trouble by taking by university, taking stands that really should be the prerogative of its students and faculty, that there isn't any reason that a university should have a foreign policy or should, and in general, at the level of discourse where just calling someone a racist is considered a counter-argument or a refutation. So we formed this council to try to push back, to try to offer emotional support to those who are under attack, because it can be devastating to be the target of a cancellation campaign, to also be a constituency that would, while activists are yelling into an administrator's ear and a lot of the problems that universities have faced have come from the fact that deans and provosts and presidents just wanna make trouble go away. And so if someone is yelling at them and making their life miserable, they'll do whatever it takes to get them to shut up. So we figure if we also yell at them, then they'll actually have to think about what's the optimal thing to do rather than just do what makes the noise go down. Do you feel like it's having, I mean, that this time it's different, that this time it's different? There have been flare-ups in the past, but it seems like the outrage over the response to, I mean, it was really the congressional hearing about the college responses to the attacks by Hamas on Israel, you know, is it different this time? I think so, that Harvard itself and is in a kind of crisis by its own standards, which is to say that donations are down. And so. And so. And so. And so. It doesn't really need the money, but it wants the money, right? Yes. And applications are down. It's become a national joke. I have a collection of memes and headlines and bumper stickers, like the bumper sticker my son didn't get into Harvard. Editorial cartoon of a corporate guy saying, this guy has a stellar resume, straight A's, top scores, didn't go to Harvard. So the reputation, which is something that, which is a huge resource that Harvard has drawn on, is threatened. And when it's threatened, a lot of Harvard's comparative advantage will also be threatened. Now, Harvard has a lot of money, but it also can, to some extent, coast on its reputation. And it can only go down, right? I mean, for the longest time. And at least if the past few months are an indication it is. And you, I mean, you also pointed out in that Boston Globe piece and elsewhere that it wasn't just that. I mean, the affirmative action case that Harvard lost, does that play into the sense that, okay, like Harvard has been moving in the wrong direction for a long period of time and needs to kind of back up and get back on the highway? Yeah, it did, it certainly got Harvard's attention. And the fact that it is, it does have an outsized reputation means that it has a certain cushion that it doesn't necessarily, not every department has to compete to be the best in the country because people, students will come, graduate students will come, donors will give. And so they're saying that like psychology doesn't really have to work very hard at all, right? Well, it, I mean, psychology has gone through waves and my former colleague Steve Costlin is here who made it the, I think the best department in the country when he was a chair and working behind the scenes, which is one of the reasons that I decamped MIT for Harvard almost 20, well, more than 20 years ago. But the actual quality of departments can go up and down but Harvard has a certain buffer because of its reputation, which is now being threatened. And a lot of the things that we're proposing would actually, we like, we meaning the council on academic freedom would actually take some, leave some headaches on the administration itself, even though their prime driver is to avoid bad publicity, keep the donations going. But a lot of the trouble, especially that our former president, Claudine Gay found herself in, could have been avoided if Harvard did have a more robust academic freedom policy, among other things. What do you mean by that? That plagiarism would have been allowed under a more, well, I'm joking, but you in the op ed that you had written, you said you didn't think that it was a hanging offense, gay's appearance in the, in response in the congressional hearing. That was before the plagiarism came out. Yes, that was before. Is the plagiarism, was that a legitimate firing offense or is that kind of a side issue? For me, it was a side issue. And I think I just won't go there because it's a, I mean, that was her. She was, her testimony did not differ from the other two elite university presidents. Only one is left, right? The MIT president. Liz McGill left even before and Sally Cornblath is still a president of MIT, although also under fire. But I think focusing on Claudine Gay was a bit of a distraction because the problems are more, as we say, systemic. But among them are the fact that universities feel that they have to, universities and their divisions that they have to offer moral guidance, some sort of pastoral counseling to a grateful nation, what they ought to feel in response to various tragedies and outrageous, and that inevitably gets them into trouble because someone will think they haven't, it was too early, it was too late, it was too strong, it was only one side was represented, they were two on the other hand. So if they just could shut up and point to a policy that said, we have to shut up, we don't comment. As the University of Chicago has done for more than 50 years, it would just get them off the hook. They don't have to comment on Ukraine. So that's the institution of neutrality. And Chicago, it does sticks by that pretty well. That is, if a department or a center puts up a statement, then they're under pressure to take it down. And the reason that it's relevant to academic freedom is that it's just prejudicial to the people working in the university, or in particular in the departments, if your department chair is posting some opinion on police shootings or Palestine or Ukraine. Donald Trump, I'm sure that happens a lot. Yeah, we love Trump, I love Trump, my department loves Trump right all the time. All the time, yes. But it is prejudicial to the faculty and the students who have to worry are my professional prospects at stake if I take a position that differs from the official one on my department website. In your world of institution of neutrality, would individual faculty be free to issue them students and everything? Yeah, absolutely. It's just that the institution itself should be the arena, it should be the debating club. It shouldn't actually be a debater. Right. And that leads into one of the five principles the next one, after institution of neutrality was non-violence, which seems insane, right? That you have to say, the colleges should be mostly non-violent places. But how does that fit in? Yeah, again, I think we'd be actually saving the university from themselves. But the idea that a legitimate form of expression of opinion in a university campus should be forcibly ejecting a dean from his office and occupying the building. That just shouldn't be what a university is about. Now, I think a lot of faculty have a certain nostalgia for when they did it in the 60s to protest Vietnam. And it's like, isn't it cute, the younger generations doing the same thing? But it really isn't OK for a number of reasons. It's a commitment to the wrong ideals. The ideal of the university ought to be persuasion, the careful formation of arguments, not chanting slogans over bullhorns and getting in other students' faces. So non-violence includes shouting down, like drowning out speakers. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to preclude somebody from speaking. Exactly. There should not be a heckler's veto. That is, protest obviously is protected. And protest could involve holding placards. It could include shouting out, you lie in the middle of a lecture, but it can't involve forcing speakers off the stage, drowning them out, drawing a banner across the stage so that speakers can't see them. That is, restricting other speech as an ostensible form of expression of your own. Do you feel like the kind of response that came after, and most of this stuff was touched up by the October 7 attacks, but do you feel like students and faculty at Harvard or elsewhere like kind of understand this isn't simply hypothetical, that non-violence is actually a principle that we need to kind of hold to? Surprisingly, we've had to make the case, or some of us have, that it's not OK to invade a classroom and start chanting slogans over bullhorns. But we had to make that case and that the university should be consistent in cracking down on it. Again, to protect itself, such as the lawsuit filed by the students against anti-Semitism who have pointed to episodes in which Jewish students have been intimidated, have been blocked, in one case, were assaulted. And if the university just had a policy that speech is fine, it's OK, we encourage it, but physical force is not and acted consistently, then they would be off the hook for selective enforcement. And in fact, now if they started to enforce it against the often quite disruptive Palestinian student groups, then the Palestinian students groups could file a lawsuit saying, well, how come they're enforcing it against us and they don't enforce it against other groups? And if it was just clear, this is the policy, this is what we recognize as speech, this is what we recognize as force and to be consistent, it would remove a headache from them. And do you think the bookstore should stop selling Harvard branded bullhorns? Yeah. It's like, it's always amazing, right? Where do these bullhorns come? I guess Amazon will deliver anything in a couple of hours, right? Well, and also just the first point of the five point plan was just a consistent commitment to academic freedom, because another reason that Claudine Gaickon into such trouble is that when she was given, what admittedly was a kind of a trap that she walked into. That is, if students called for genocide against Jews, would that be prohibited by Harvard's code of conduct? And she made a pretty hardcore ACLU style free speech argument, which came across as hollow or worse, because we've had a lecturer who was kind of driven out of Harvard for saying they're two sexes. We've had a professor whose course is just only two sexes. Yeah, exactly. They're only two sexes. But there is another professor whose course was canceled because he wanted to apply to explore how counterinsurgency techniques could be used against gang warfare. We had a professor in the School of Public Health who, someone doing some offense archaeology, uncovered the fact that he had cosigned an amicus brief for the Obergefell Supreme Court case against a national policy allowing gay marriage. There were calls for his tenure to be revoked, for his classes to be boycotted. He had to undergo struggle sessions and restorative justice sessions and basically kind of grovel in front of a mob. So these are given Harvard's history of those cases and others to all of us and say, well, genocide, it's just a matter of I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death you write to say it, came off as a little bit hollow and hypocritical. And if Harvard had had a free speech policy that was reasonably enforced before that, then at least she would have had something of a leg to stand on and standing on principle. And she was technically correct in the same way that there's no law in the United States that says you can't call for a Holocaust, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, but when it's so selectively prosecuted, then it becomes ludicrous and literally becomes a national joke or a national disgrace.